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I have (text) files without extension located in an indexed location. Is it possible using Windows 8.1 to search in their content?

Problems: 1. They have no extension, so I cannot specify their indexing behaviour. (Also, I rather not do that for every single file type I might want to search...) 2. Because they are located in an indexed location the Explorer option "When searching non indexed locations: Always search file names and contents" has no effect.

Any ideas? Do I really have to install a 3rd party tool just to search through file contents?

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  • 1
    Have you seen/heard of Agent Ransack?
    – Rowland Shaw
    Commented Jan 22, 2015 at 16:10
  • @RowlandShaw No I had not. Thank you. I think it is ridiculous that I have to clutter my PC with yet another tool to do something that Windows used to be able to do without problems... grrr
    – ARF
    Commented Jan 22, 2015 at 19:00
  • In fairness, it's a lot better than any built in tool with previous versions of Windows...
    – Rowland Shaw
    Commented Jan 22, 2015 at 20:53

1 Answer 1

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I'm convinced there is no way to accomplish what you want with Windows 8.1 search, however you don't need to install a 3rd party tool either. Consider two files:

foo.txt
foo

Both files contain the text "some text". If you use the windows search bar, you could search for that phrase using: contents:"some text" but that will only find foo.txt because extensionless files are not searched. But you can still use the built in command line tool findstr, like so:

findstr /c:"some text" *

or

findstr /s /i /c:"some text" *

which will include Subdirectories and Ignore case sensitivity of the search.

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